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How This Guy Lied His Way Into MSNBC, ABC News, The New York Times and More

Ryan Holiday could be called an “expert.” As head of marketing for American Apparel, an online strategist for Tucker Max, and self-styled “media manipulator,” he can talk social media and modern advertising with the best of them – he’s done so both online and in print on countless occasions. He is not an expert in barefoot running, investing, vinyl records, or insomnia. But he is a liar. With a little creative use of the internet, he’s been quoted in news sources from small blogs to the most reputable outlets in the country talking about all of those things.

Holiday, 25 years old and based in New Orleans, mostly wanted to see if it could be done. He had been getting blogs to write what he wanted for years, and had developed a sense of how stories were put together in the internet age. He thought he could push the envelope a bit further.

“I knew that bloggers would print anything, so I thought, what if, as an experiment, I tried to prove that they will literally print anything?” he says. “Instead of trying to get press to benefit myself, I just wanted to get any press for any reason as a joke.”

He used Help a Reporter Out (HARO), a free service that puts sources in touch with reporters. Basically, a reporter sends a query, and a slew of people wanting to comment on the story email back. He decided to respond to each and every query he got, whether or not he knew anything about the topic. He didn’t even do it himself — he enlisted an assistant to use his name in order to field as many requests as humanly possible.

“I could hear hands going up and down the frets, and stuff that they probably didn’t want you to hear. Which is a nice little surprise,” he told them.

Holiday had a lot of advantages in his experiment – his title as Marketing Director for American Apparel made him seem respectable, and most of his stories were such thorough lies that they came out on the other side of believable. But a quick Google search would have raised red flags for anyone using him as a source. For one thing, he wrote a book called “Trust Me, I’m Lying.”His Huffington Post profile has the word “notorious” in the first line. He’s repeatedly described himself as a “media manipulator.” He has a checkered reputation online, and his penchant for media stunts is well-documented. He also writes for Forbes, where a few of his big stories have generated more than their share of controversy. I got a leak from him about Tucker Max back in February, and sure enough, traffic ensued.

None of that came up as he shot out story after story to dozens of news sources. Throughout the experiment, he says he received a single fact checking email — the site sent an email to the same address he had used for the pitch, asking if he was indeed Ryan Holiday. He said yes.

Lying to journalists is nothing new. People have swindled newspapers for free publicity long before tools like HARO even existed. Holiday is probing just how easy it can be in 2012. HARO Founder Peter Shankman notes that anyone abusing the system can be flagged and banned, and ultimately, the service is just a tool, and should be subject to all the same old rules of journalism.

“As a journalist, it’s always been your job to do your research and check the source, whether you find that source on the street, on Craigslist or on HARO,” he says. “If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing your job however you find the source.”

From a reporter’s perspective, it’s not hard to see how it happens. I used HARO once, for this story. Tools like this streamline the hectic process that is blogging — were the situation different, I could see easily myself swindled by someone like Holiday. With each story he was quoted in, there would have been an analog way to get the source – to find an insomniac, call a doctor who specializes in insomnia and ask if any of his or her patients would be willing to go on record. For vinyl records, call a store and ask the owner to put you in touch with his best customer. But oftentimes, it can be hard to justify taking the long way around when news moves at the speed of the internet.

For Roy Furchgott, the reporter from the New York Times, this kind of lie can be hard to catch — Holiday sounded just like all the other record collectors he had talked to, and it was hard to imagine why someone would lie about something so mundane.

“He gave a fairly credible account in line with what most vinyl record collectors and owners say,” he says. “So I took his word on it, as frequently happens, and you’re telling me that he suckered me.”

“I’ve been in the business a fairly long time, and I’ve seen this happen many times even prior to blogs. I don’t think this is isolated or terribly, terribly unusual.”

Holiday does it for the attention, the opportunity to point out some of the excesses of the modern blogosphere, and the lulz. Empires will not fall because he claimed someone once sneezed on him. Still, it gives one reason to stop and think about what the quest for traffic and eyeballs does to news. Depending on how you look at it, stunts like this either erode the trust a reader has in a publication, or point out that it may have been misplaced to begin with. It’s not a big leap to imagine somebody using those same tools for more nefarious purposes.

“A well made article and a poorly made article both do clicks the same way,” says Holiday. “There’s no incentive to do good work. We know that quotas make cops do sh***y things, or academic admissions offices do sh**ty things, and they make bloggers do sh***y things too.”

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With all due respect, your comment is silly and unwarranted. I own a small boutique law firm in Boston and – using HARO – I’ve been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, TheStreet.com, and others. A friend of mine who runs a PR firm here in Boston asked me who was running my media campaign because of all the (free) exposure I was getting. And, as a former journalist myself, I would have killed for a service like HARO back in my reporting days.

The bottom line is that there have always been jackasses who try to trick reporters and there always will be. Sometimes even very good reporters get taken. Blaming HARO for any of this is like blaming AT&T for the existence of the Jerky Boys or the legions of Howard Stern fans who like to shout “Ba-ba-booey.”

I stood in the corner of the BullS**itter in a previous post. And still do.

However, blaming AT&T, or any other ISP is like blaming Tide for making your clothes smell good. Just dumb. But perhaps the angry person is one who thrives better when in a controlled environment, like old school Russia. Or maybe a Mac user.

/Just referring to the ‘walled garden’ effect. I don’t hate Apple at all. Had a few. Windows keeps me employed though :-) //I.T. guy who likes Mac and PC.

Thanks for bringing this to people’s attention. This isn’t the first time HARO was rocked with a scam. As notes in their terms”

“Queries for product samples will only be accepted from reporters representing TV stations and verified print media. Product sample requests from websites or radio station reporters are not permitted. This is in order to protect our users from fraud and other scams. …”

This was due to one scammer that according to Peter swindled people previously. Similar to the scam you are reporting on, the staff of HARO incorrectly assume that someone who says they represent TV and print are who they say they are (no verification is required by HARO) and those that respond to queries can and most likely will be scammed again. Moreover it makes bloggers and other online journalists second class citizens and in particular hurts PR people in the tech industry since those journalists primarily work online.

HARO’s lack of verification and curation of sources and journalists makes it dangerous and unreliable. This guy “came out” as a scammer — but I’m sure thousands of others responded just to get their name in the paper.

Like we needed any more proof that Ryan Holliday is a raging a**hole. I think that’s been well established.

What I’d like to know is why Forbes still allows him to contribute blog posts. The man does brag about being a complete liar, does he not? Does anyone bother to fact check anything Holliday posts on this site?

I have used HARO and ProfNet quite extensively in my 3,297 years of journalism. Fortunately, I have never run across Holliday as a source. But I can see how easily something like that could happen. I don’t do background checks on every person I interview. I’m not sure that’s even possible. Anyone can create a fake LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc to back up a false identity. Ultimately the only way to know someone is who they say they are is to ask someone else who allegedly knows them — and then you have to trust that person. For a story about vinyl record collectors? Who has the time?

I have spent a lot of time pondering this question — how do I know the person I’m talking to is geniune? how does that person know I’m genuine? and the only solution is some kind of third party identification verification system. we don’t really have one of those, outside of the financial services industry and the government.

It was a stupid attention-getting exercise and nothing more — exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from that guy.

This is so brilliantly meta! Not only can Holiday manipulate the media into thinking he’s a collector of vinyl records, he can then use that story to manipulate Dave Thier who then manipulates his readers into thinking that only “liberal” media uses faulty sources. Notice how Ryan claims he responded to every request, but what media outlets were duped? MSNBC, NY Times, ABC—the bastions of “liberal” media.

And Holiday can claim that he wasn’t doing it to raise his profile—in fact, he can have Thier claim this on Thier’s blog, which was picked up by NOLA.com (where I found it). As it turns out Thier’s blog links to Holiday’s blog. Nope, not using this for self-promotion.

This stinks like a rotten fish. I guess that’s the Forbes echo chamber, where “journalists” who professionally lie are bloggers.

Also, others have pointed out how groundbreaking Holiday’s interventions were. Now that we know Holiday can’t hear fingers moving on the frets with vinyl I suppose the whole vinyl renaissance will collapse. Perhaps instead Holiday could use his skills to expose how corporations and our government manipulate media all the time. If he needs a tutorial I suggest he start with Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.

Lastly, I will point out that Holliday cannot write. From his blog: “But in this rising class, I also place some unlikely figures. Michael Arrington, former editor and founder of the popular blog TechCrunch. ”

The second sentence is a fragment, without anything resembling a verb to go with the subject. Perhaps he is a proud graduate of our (New Orleans’) excellent public school system.

I’ve written Steve Forbes about the very low content quality of some of these “contributors,” using Google to track how far off the rails they get. Just recently, I believe they finally roped in one guy who was an IRS expert, but kept posting about non-IRS stuff. As in, if you’re expert on the IRS — stay on F’ing topic.

Academics are well-known for their B.S. They think “professor” means being an expert on everything and no one else could be right.

Wrong — duh. And they need to be called out, 100% of the time. As in, “show us your spreadsheet on that.” Or, like with Kruggie, “so you have an economic viewpoint — so do 500 other PhDs in economics.”